Session Descriptions

Session 1: 9:45am-11:00am

This workshop will explore tools and tactics for doing community-based participatory outreach, analysis and design with food insecure individuals. Attendees will learn about ways to create more inclusive spaces within their work, design creative strategies to gather feedback and implement that feedback within their programs and operations.

Anti-Hunger Advocacy and Racial JusticeMinerva Delgado, Director of Coalitions and Advocacy, Alliance to End Hunger; Marlysa Gamblin, Domestic Advisor for Policies and Programs for Specific Populations, Bread for the World

African American and Latino communities are disproportionately impacted by hunger in the U.S. However, their voices are often ignored when it comes to making policy. This session will explain the racial wealth gap, discuss how to improve SNAP for communities of color and share effective advocacy strategies.

This workshop will provide an overview of how structural racism has contributed to disproportionate rates of food insecurity and hunger in communities of color. We will then look at the role emergency food providers play in perpetuating structural racism and then begin to explore ways of dismantling racism in our organizations.

Learn about the impacts of Oregon Food Bank’s Partner Agency Training series which focuses on practicing equity and social justice. Discussions during workshops on Racial Justice, Community Leadership Development, LGBTQ Justice, Cultural Responsiveness, and other topics are reshaping our network. OFB staff will highlight the impacts of the series and two agencies will discuss the utility of the trainings in their agencies.

Santa Barbara County’s Alma Cena Sana (the healthy soul kitchen) is a place where the community can come together around helping each other be healthy with food. Community Food Bank in Tucson pursues a complementary approach, utilizing community development strategies and novel partnerships to ensure that food is the first, but not the last, step in building sustainable communities. Join us to share tips and practices for developing similar strategies in your communities.

This workshop will present the ways that our organization is shifting from transactional approaches to developing member-centered and member-led approaches. We will present our teams approach as so far developed and engage in discussion and dialogue about ways to do this in feasible, effective, and philosophically just ways. This session will use games as an interactive approach for attendees to share and discuss about their successes and barriers to diverse engagement.

Targeting of clinics or hospitals based on your area’s underserved populations is key. There is usually the most support at the clinics serving the most marginalized patients. Each area will have different demographics and health care facilities targeting their underserved populations. Figure this out and start there. Partnering with organizational advocates for these marginalized groups provides understanding, access and credibility

Despite the stereotypes, living in poverty means often feeling hopeless, unable to plan for the future, and socially isolated. How can we facilitate effective civic engagement opportunities for food bank participants? This participatory workshop will expand your personal reflection on experiences with poverty and privilege, and impart principles for effective civic engagement that allow for people in poverty and their allies to meaningfully engage with public decision makers.

How the Law Can Yield a Harvest for Black FarmersCandace A. Spencer, J.D., Food Systems Consultant

Land loss is a significant issue threatening the viability of Black farming and wealth-building of Black landowners. This session proposes a legal entity that collaborates with Black farmers and landowners to address land loss. The session will also discuss tools to apply this solution to various locations.

What does sharing leadership mean in a non-profit organization committed to justice? We will discuss how we share decision-making and promote multiple leaders in running our 14 food bank sites. Come prepared to share what you are doing or would like to see at your organizations too!

Join us to engage in dialogue and learning around strategies to mobilize institutional transformation. This session uses the work done CA through the UC and CSU systems to address basic needs insecurities among students as a case study to highlight success strategies in action. This session will include the latest data from both state and national studies and analysis as well as insights into a preventative model, dyad exercises, areas of focused community learning, and sharing of materials. Participants will walk away from this session with tools and inspirations that will help them to engage in transformative change on their campuses or in their state systems.

This session will focus specifically on barriers faced by the refugee and immigrant community and cross sectional implications on race/ethnicity as understood by different cultures. By better understanding culturally-specific challenges, participants will be better positioned to identify and respond to inequities in service. We will share successful strategies that have worked for IRCO’s growing Hunger Relief program and innovative methods we have used to integrate the skills and knowledge of our clients and give them a central role in shaping services.

This session will discuss how to promote food access programs to health care providers, insurance companies, and community members as an effective means of preventing and managing diet related illnesses. Focusing on a partnership between the Curbside Market and a family medicine practice in the city of Rochester, we will discuss the development of the program and strategies to adapt our model in communities across the country.

Many food assistance organizations across the United States are, or began as, faith-based. Although most major religions espouse justice and equity, our food ministries often reflect paternalistic models of charity. This workshop will be an inter-faith dialogue focused on making changes to shift from charity to justice in faith-based food system work.

The Right to Food calls on governments to ensure that all people are free from hunger and that they have physical and economic access at all times to sufficient, nutritious food that is sustainably produced. Yet, nearly half a century into the food banking experiment, the US has failed to solve its hunger problem and reliance on “emergency” sources has become chronic. In this workshop we will explore the utility of the right to food framing to serve as an organizing tool and catalyst for building power for a fundamental shift in systems and policies that have shaped our current food system and leave 42.2 million Americans hungry.

How are rezoning, gentrification, and displacement related to food justice? Join us for an interactive workshop to learn about our organizing work in the South Bronx, create problem trees to identify the root causes of food insecurity, and discuss how we as a community can reframe food insecurity to better address its root causes.

This interactive session explores how community-academic partnerships and qualitative research can foster change-based, inclusive and client-driven programming at food banks. Discover how research might benefit your own organizational goals and strategies and gain hands-on advice about how to work with qualitative data, and initiate and maintain successful partnerships.

Unity Farm is a dynamic partnership between MudBone Grown and Oregon Food Bank. Though the principles of placemaking, we’ll share the evolution of this collaborative farm project, explore the role of small black-led agricultural enterprises in addressing food insecurity and examine how reclaiming urban spaces in the face of gentrification can foster community healing.

Health programming has long focused on nutrition education and individual-level behavior. But achieving healthier Latino communities requires a shift in focus to systemic and environmental factors. Presenters will share their food justice work with Latinos and then participants will discuss key themes and ideas for action.

Building community food security requires interdisciplinary solutions that engage partners across all sectors of the food system – from farmers to food recovery organizations. Participants of this session will learn innovative methods for linking community efforts and building partnerships between groups engaged in all aspects of food systems work. Case studies include successful projects in Washington State with small farms, tribal, and low-income communities.

How do we ensure the stories we tell through our organizations are truthful without being unintentionally exploitative? How can we involve food-insecure people in the decision-making processes they are directly affected by? Consider these questions and more as we work towards a future of true collaboration as allies.

CountyFear of deportation is keeping people away from food pantries. What can we do to ensure that immigrants and refugees have access to food? How can we create safe spaces without becoming targets? How can we protect client data? Join us for a lively discussion and to share strategies for successfully supporting immigrant communities.

Join us for a discussion about how evaluation can strengthen your work. Hear about Manna Food Center’s inclusion of equity and dignity in program evaluation. Learn from Missoula Food Bank about including the voice of clients, and from The Greater Boston Food Bank about using mapping to reach long-term goals.

Flowers & Bullets Collective organizes their neighborhood to create alternatives to the health disparities in their barrio. Although this community lacks resources and is restricted by city zoning, F&B leverages social capital to reclaim a closed school in their neighborhood. In this session you will learn how F&B uses food and community organizing to connect with their neighbors.

City Harvest Community Engagement Managers will offer methods for food justice based community engagement by highlighting each of their distinct community organizing strategies through City Harvest’s Healthy Neighborhood Initiative. Participants will then break into groups to develop community engagement strategies for fictional neighborhoods with very real, yet unique, profiles.

This session will guide participants to develop strategies that address food access using an intersectional, community centered approach. Participants will go through a process of exploration into how their communities’ food accessibility has been shaped by institutionalized racism. Presenters will provide examples of strategies which address these factors.

Deep Dives

Session 5: 1:30-4:30pm

Make the Model Work for You: Help Shape the Closing the Hunger Gap Network
Members of the Closing the Hunger Gap Leadership Team

Closing the Hunger Gap is more than a conference. It is a network of likeminded organizations and individuals working to expand hunger relief efforts beyond food distribution and towards strategies that promote social justice and address the root causes of hunger. You are the strength of this network. To better support and engage with each other, and to elevate the collective voice of the Closing the Hunger Gap network, we need your help to build an organizational structure that is relevant and useful to you. Join members of the Closing the Hunger Gap leadership team for an honest and thoughtful workshop to shape the structure of Closing the Hunger Gap. This workshop will be a facilitated conversation about what it mean to be part of a network that wants to promote and model racial equity, what can we do together that we can’t do as individual organizations, what activities would be important for the network to pursue, and what it means to be a member of Closing the Hunger Gap. If you want to be a part of deciding about these questions, join us for this session and help figure out how we can best work together.

Over this past year, anti-hunger and anti-poverty advocates have faced a constant barrage of federal policy battles, the consequences of which would put struggling families and individuals’ lives at risk. In this deep dive, we’ll give you the chance to learn the latest federal policy updates and recharge with others to share ideas about advocacy actions you can implement. We’ll offer 6 facilitated small group discussions on the following topics: SNAP and other safety net programs in the federal budget appropriations process, the 2018 Farm Bill, federal tax reform, health care and the Affordable Care Act, immigration, and state legislative initiatives.

Using a “speed dating” approach, attendees will get 30-40 minutes to meet in a small group on a topic of their choosing to get a policy briefing from the group facilitators, exchange ideas about advocacy actions you can implement at home, and brainstorm ways to collaborate with each other to strengthen state and federal advocacy efforts before moving onto a small group discussion on a different topic. We will compile ideas from each small group discussion on each of our topics and send a comprehensive list of ideas, resources, and contact information so you can implement ideas and continue collaborative partnerships with each other long after the session is over.

How to Survive as a Black/Brown Individual in the Non-profit Industrial Complex
Surabhi Mahajan, Gardening Education Coordinator in Salem, Oregon

Many times it is ignored how much a non-profit workplace can imitate and enforce oppressive policies and culture resulting in biases and microaggressive acts faced by employees of color. Many times there are not great systems of dealing with sensitive, power-based issues in the workplace between employees, volunteers, and even clients we serve. This session will provide space for folks of color working in the non-profit world to alleviate hunger to share experiences where their work was hampered by microaggressive acts. This session will include activities to help identify and share different strategies of not only coping but continuing to accomplish one’s goals.

This session is specifically for racially marginalized people working in non-profits and in the food banking/health world. When an organization doesn’t have the policies or systems set up to be responsible when racially insensitive acts come up, that reflects on how they treat marginalized people in their community. It is imperative for people of color to be represented in the non-profit world, be supported in the ways they need to be, and to create connections and network around how to deal with racism and issues of power-based violence in the workplace to continue serving people in the community. This session will not lecture or make participants follow any course of action but provide a space for people to speak freely about their experiences and build support in validation around those experiences. The voice of this session will be the marginalized folks working to alleviate hunger in our communities.

This workshop will explore common patterns of white women working in “helping” professions, specifically the food movement. It is facilitated by two cis white women and intended to explore the experience of those socialized as white and female. How can people with white-skin privilege support and contribute to multiracial and multicultural food spaces? Through work in food justice how do white women inadvertently contribute to the maintenance of the current system? What potentials and models exist for subversion to “shake” the system towards greater equity and justice?

This session focuses on the potentially harmful and often unacknowledged ways that white women’s work in food maintains a system of extreme inequality. It seeks to support personal and organizational investigation of the patterns of the buffer zone in order to identify opportunities to challenge this dynamic and create a more just and equitable food system. By learning more about the buffer zone, food movement workers with racial and economic privilege will be better equipped to show up in the multiracial and multicultural food system we collectively envision.

This interactive workshop includes a brief presentation on Paul Kivel’s concept of the buffer zone. Group activities will surface common patterns and behaviors of white women in the food system, and allow time to digest the material and share personal insights. The workshop will conclude with individual reflection/commitments to bring the learning back to home organizations and communities.

This is activity-based session will demonstrate two activities that are part of a longer training we currently facilitate at our food bank for volunteers, partners, and clients, as a way to create transformative learning opportunities and gain skills for informed advocacy efforts.
The first activity asks participants to brainstorm the stereotypes around poverty. We then break into small groups, where each group has a scenario of an individual/family in poverty, tasked with creating a budget and plan for making it month to month or day to day. Small groups report back and reflect on the stress, frustration, and hopelessness they felt- leading into discussion around the reality of poverty. In the second section, we role-play a meeting with “the governor,” where the person in power shuts down the community members trying to express their concerns. We then brainstorm as a group effective methods for civic engagement, as an advocate for people in poverty.

The first activity is designed to simulate the feeling of living in poverty- it feels stressful, frustrating, hopeless, with no ability to plan for the future. For participants without lived experience, it can be a very eye-opening activity to try and create a working budget and not be able to succeed.

The second activity builds on the first- understanding the realities of poverty, how do you become an effective advocate? The tools and principles discussed for effective civic engagement allow for people in poverty and their allies to successfully engage with policy makers and others in positions of power to inform decision-making.

Move beyond emergency food and explore fresh, sustainable solutions to hunger and economic inequity in your community. Talk with a broad array of people who work in different sectors of the Washington food system and have each developed innovative programs that increase access to fresh produce in hungry communities and also support regional economic growth. Leave with an action plan to grow programs and partnerships in your community.

Whether you joined the Changing the Narrative from Charity to Justice: Story-based Strategy Training earlier in the week or are just excited to build strategies around narrative change – this deep dive is for you! Over the last several months we have been organizing, interviewing, surveying and workshopping what narrative shifts around hunger in the U.S. could look like. At the training earlier this week, we worked together to generate a narrative power analysis to challenge the dominate narratives around the solutions to hunger in the U.S. Now we will use that analysis to begin developing strategies and prototyping campaign ideas to build into the next phase of this narrative change work. This deep dive is intended to be a generative space where we can begin brainstorming and testing potential campaign slogans, direct actions, narrative tools, organizing strategies and more. It is also an opportunity to share your voice, perspective and ideas to help collectively shape a new narrative around hunger in U.S. and learn more about on-going opportunities to engage in this work. The Deep Dive will be supported by WhyHunger, the Center for Story-Based Strategy and other network members.